Why did I slap Sid tonight? I was enraged, yes—not from mere anger but from something more uncaged—but honestly I can’t recall what he says to me that leads, a second later, to my hand striking his well-shaven cheek. So quick he doesn’t have time even to look shocked. Not so the rest of the room—the rich patrons eating stuffed-pepper canapés prepared by overeducated kitchen slaves; the editor of the Spring Green Home News; Vanna and the three architects who fight over her attentions and her bed. All stare, mouths agape. The Widow, however, remains cool. Slowly she turns her gaze to me from across the long room, predatory satisfaction intensifying the yellowish gleam in her eyes. And I see that I have played right into her hands. Somehow through dark magic she has orchestrated this moment. She stands milking her visitors’ stunned silence as long as she dares, before offering them an arched painted-on eyebrow and remarking, As you can see, friends, concentrated passion lies at the heart of all we do here.
In the wake of stilted laughter, Sid doesn’t follow me out of the room. Pam is babysitting Yasha in our apartment, so I can’t go there. It isn’t until I’ve escaped the building and tucked myself inside the Dodge that I clearly see the kopek-size stain on the front of my dress. The dress Sid handpicked for me during our hurried courtship. Some bit of oil that will never come out.
And suddenly I remember what my husband said to me that made me an animal that had to strike him.
Look at you. You have gone and ruined another beautiful thing.
Look at me. I have gone and ruined another beautiful thing.
I must put down this pen and notebook. Hide them in the glove box, where they can do no further damage until next time. Get out of this car and breathe the night air. And the stars, yes, the stars, will be clear for once in their constellations, each a story that is also an uncorrupted memory, the same here as in Russia. And perhaps I will know then why I came to this godforsaken place to start a new life in the ashes of the old.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Late one afternoon in the fall of ’71, a black Town Car pulled up in front of my office building, where I stood hunting in vain for a taxi to take me to Penn Station. The car’s rear door swung open and Dick Thompson leaned out, mouth twisted in that half smile of ironic apology that he’d once referred to, modestly, as his “spook’s calling card.”
“Hello, Peter,” he greeted me. “How about I buy you a martini, and you can take the seven-forty-nine instead?”
It was a rhetorical question, we both knew. Half an hour later, we were sipping drinks—always Jameson for him, neat—at a corner table in a crowded Irish bar near Penn Station. (Dick preferred the reliable din of such places.) After a minute or two of small talk, his internal timer went off, and he got down to business.
“When was the last you heard from her?” he began.
“A postcard when they arrived in Scottsdale last month,” I told him.
“How’d she sound?”
“Hard to say. It was just a few lines.”
“What was the picture?”
“Which picture?”
“On the postcard.”
“I don’t know…some kind of flowering cactus? Does it matter?”
Dick merely nodded as if the flowering cactus, if that’s what it was, might well prove significant. “I gather the marriage is in trouble,” he said. “And she and Wright’s widow are fighting like Siamese fish. I think we both know who’s going to win that war, and it isn’t our Russian friend.”
“You seem pretty well informed for someone who’s never personally been to the high desert.”
I thought he might crack a smile then, but he didn’t. “Listen, Peter, Washington’s concerned she might get kicked out by these cultists and end up drifting around the country with no money and a wagonload of grievances to air. Not what we need right now, under the circumstances.”
“You know, Dick, you’re starting to sound a little like your boss Nixon.”
He shrugged, his expression suddenly tired. “Hazard of the trade these days, I guess.”
“Well, you can tell ‘Washington’ that I share their concerns, though for different reasons.”
He studied me a moment over the rim of his glass. “Care to elaborate?”
“Look,” I said. “No question she can be impossible to deal with sometimes. But think what she’s come from. It’s amazing she’s even sane.”
“I agree with you, Peter, amazing she’s sane. But it’s early days. Down the road, that’s the concern.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Just continue to keep an eye on her. Let me know your thoughts now and then.”
* * *
—
The 7:49 to Princeton was a more culturally mixed affair than the 6:01, which I took most evenings. We older types in dark suits with our briefcases stuffed with legal files and 10-Ks were joined by long-haired students heading back to campus after a day spent AWOL in the city. Paperbacks of Heller and Vonnegut, Roth and Barthelme were suddenly among us, and bright color flashes of scarves and, mingled with the usual cloud of cigarette smoke, the sheepy lanolin smell of heavy wool sweaters.
A couple of the women in my car that evening were frankly beautiful. I watched them in stolen glances through a scrim of men half my age, and tried to busy myself with the work I’d brought.
At New Brunswick, after the heavyset banker beside me disembarked, I allowed myself to spread out on my seat and close my eyes. Not to sleep, but to be alone. The train rocked a couple of times and began, as though embarrassed by itself, to drift forward, the first few crossrails thumping under the cars. One of the coeds laughed at something her boyfriend said. I opened my eyes and there was my own face, hollowed and paled, almost translucent, in the window dividing interior light from outer dark. I leaned closer, to see through myself. Pole lamps were shining every ten yards or so along the tracks, casting circles of polluted, diminishing light, making the industrial buildings that lined the route out of town appear ruined. And then, as we began to pick up speed, I noticed a small heart-shaped silhouette hanging in the night sky, affixed to the bristling train wires by an invisible thread. A balloon that had escaped some girl’s birthday party, I imagined. Just a glimpse, then gone.
* * *
—
A Sunday morning. My father dead a month. His passing a relief, to be honest, he’d been ill for so long, unable during the last year to even lift his hands. And yet, since the funeral, my mother has hardly left her bedroom. After Kaddish and seven days of shivah, the house empty again but for the two of us. And we both know that this is how it is, and how it’s going to be, so there is no need to talk about that, and we never will.
Unsupervised, cut loose, I pedal my bike in the cool early morning as far as it will take me—out beyond the town limits and the last dying factory, until the road narrows and becomes dirt and the planted fields are dense with green soy except where the brown furrows cut through. I pedal because the farther I go, the easier it is to forget what I’ve left behind. I pedal because ever since my father’s death I’ve had a fantasy that if I can just keep pedaling, my bike will eventually carry me to a great city beyond the state I live in, New York perhaps, and there, recognizing my true destination, I will climb off my bike and stand on my own two feet as something other than what I am now. I don’t know what this means; it’s only a feeling that sits, aching and immutable, on my handlebars as I pump my legs in the cool morning air, seen by no one who will remember, the bike carrying me farther from my life with each minute, the road turning back to the dirt it came from, back to land, the green soy fields, empty at this hour, spreading out around me.
* * *
—
Martha had left the light in the foyer on for me; it was past ten o’clock and my wife and daughter were asleep upstairs. I hung my overcoat and scarf in the closet and walked into the kitchen.
Waiting in front of my place at the four-seat butcher block table, as I knew it would be, was a meatloaf sandwich on white bread on a white plate. Beside the sandwich was a quarter slice of pickle, and beside the plate was a paper napkin folded in a precise triangle, and a tall glass of tap water. Always the same dinner when I came home late. The sandwich appearing, beneath the unforgiving glare of the hanging light above the table, starkly naked, like something recently interrogated.
After eating, I washed my plate and glass and set them on the dish rack to dry. I switched off the kitchen and foyer lights and trudged up the stairs. Across from the second-floor landing Jean’s door stood partially open. I hadn’t seen her all day, and in the morning I’d be gone before she woke. I stood hesitating. And then I entered her room and sat on the edge of her bed to watch her sleep for a little while.
She was ten and a half, with my high forehead and dark brown hair and thin upper lip, fuller now in rest, and Martha’s delicate ears and that expression of my wife’s that made it seem as if she were perpetually studying, though never quite enough, for some imminent test. A recent growth spurt had taken Jean, in the space of a couple of months that I’d somehow missed, from cute to gangly, her surprisingly large feet now almost touching the end of the twin mattress on which she’d first slept when she was four. On the wall above her head was a poster of the singer Carly Simon, all lush hair, long limbs, and wide mouth. It had been reported to me by Martha that for Christmas (celebrated by us in nonreligious fashion, whatever that meant) Jean was hoping for tickets to a Carly Simon concert, as well as a new turntable and a gift certificate to Tower Records. That much I knew. And so I made a mental note to myself—receiver of secondhand lists and silent nighttime watcher in my own house—as my daughter slept.
1972
12 March
Arizona
Morning, ma’am. Is Mr. Evans here?
From my front porch, I stare at this young shrub of a reporter. Quite possibly, under normal circumstances, with his blue eyes and cherubic cheeks, cleanly shaved, he is a perfectly decent southwesterner, a baseball dad and low-handicap bowler, as well as an expert carver of Thanksgiving turkeys. But these are not normal times. Which he well knows. Else why brandish notebook and pen on my porch at seven-thirty in the morning?
I tell him that Mr. Evans has gone into town. I start to close the door of my new little house—everything in it, including this door with its heavy brass knob, still feeling foreign to the touch—but he’s quicker than he looks and manages to get his foot in the way.
Is Mr. Evans residing here, ma’am? Are you two separated? Are you going to file for divorce?
Like all good hunters, he has been careful to catch his prey unawares. I stand before him in house clothes and callused bare feet, an owl’s nest of hair. Such an awkward human picture that internally he’s berating himself for not bringing a camera, I can see it in his eyes.
Absolutely not.
Then why are you living out here? Why aren’t you at Taliesin?
The Fellowship believes in communal living, I attempt to educate him, not in children or families. So my husband and myself, we agree it’s better for our son to have separation from the Fellowship. We bought this house together.
That’s not what the Fellowship’s saying. They’ve sent out a statement.
Statement? What statement? Who says this? I know nothing of any statement. Show it to me.
I don’t have it on me, but it’s definitely authentic. Official Fellowship stationery.
I know that stationery, I think, with the Architect’s famous crest and lettering. The Widow loves nothing more than to disseminate her philosophies and revisionist histories to the public on its bleached surface.
I see. So what does it say, this statement?
It says you’ve abandoned your husband, Sid Evans, and he’s seeking a divorce.
The woman’s a liar.
Mrs. Wright? He seems genuinely shocked, as if I have just damned his queen to hell. Then he gathers himself, cheeks flushed by the prospect of imminent promotion at The Arizona Republic, and neatly flips open his notebook to jot down my remarkable words.
* * *
—
Two days later, I am holding an envelope of that very stationery, addressed to me in the Widow’s black-inked hand. The stamp—she must have an awfully large supply of them—bears a likeness of her late husband, with his flamenco dancer’s black hat and flowing mane of white hair. I ask Pam, who has come to live with us, if she would take over feeding Yasha his lunch, and I slit open the envelope with the tip of a paring knife and carry the Widow’s letter out to the porch to read in private.
Your message has reached me as you intended. Rather than reply in kind, I invite you to return to the Fellowship for your husband’s sake. Assuming, of course, that you will agree to live by our rules.
From the beginning I offered you a mother’s love, which you chose to spurn. Rest assured that the invitation I make to you today is of a purely practical nature and will never be repeated.
I have no intention of returning to that place where one’s freedom is forever chained to the iron peg of that woman’s egotistical will. I want Sid to come to me of his own free thinking. Though with each week of separation that continues between us I am faced with the greater reality that our reunion will not happen. Never would I have imagined that this big strong educated man from the American West would prefer to live enslaved rather than free. But I must face the fact that he has lost his desire for independence, if indeed he ever had it. The chain has become his friend or, perhaps better, his lover. Or it has become himself, his very being, a thought that I tell you makes me sick to my soul because it means it is already too late for us, we are an ending without a story.
21 March
It’s Yasha’s pediatric nurse who suggests I see Dr. N. The nurse’s name is Roberta, and she notices that I am not myself these days, a bit beleaguered, stumped by circumstance. Or it could be my hair, which admittedly is not looking superior. Or my cigarette smoking, a rejuvenated vice. But more than anything, I suspect, it is the pound and a half that Yasha has recently lost (to say nothing of the seven I have gained). Concerned, Roberta questions me about his feeding habits and digestion, and when I am not as clear in my answers as she expects, when I seem a step or two behind in my maternal comprehension, she opens a drawer in the examination room and takes out a card and hands it to me.
This is the name of someone to talk to, she tells me in confidential tones. A psychiatrist. I think he might be able to help you.
* * *
—
Dr. N is a phlegmatic middle-aged Jewish man, balding, round-faced, and deeply tanned. He has exchanged his dress shoes (I can see them neatly lined up by his desk) for gentleman’s slippers. A bag of golf clubs leans against a corner of his soporific office.
Tell me a little about your family life, he begins, following ten minutes of informational this and that.
You mean Yasha?
Sorry, I meant your original family. Parents, and so forth. You’re from the Soviet Union, I believe you said?
Is he suggesting that he has no idea who I am? Why are you asking me this question? I demand.
Despite my aggrieved tone, Dr. N’s smile is patient, encouraging. He holds his tanned head perfectly still and waits for me to expose myself further.
I am here to save my marriage, I plead in a softer voice.
And if your marriage cannot be saved?
The question shocks me. What do you mean? But this is why I have come to you.
I understand, he says. And if I can help you succeed in this, nothing would make me happier. But life is rarely so simple, I’m sure you know, or I’d be out of work. And if it turns out that your marriage can’t be saved, for whatever reasons, you will still be you. Wherever you go. So that’s the person I’m asking you abo
ut.
* * *
—
I will never go back to Dr. N. Let us say that the person he insists on interrogating me about is not any person I wish to dine with again. And so I leave a figment of that hectored woman in his office, with the golf clubs and the slippers and the ingenious tan, and turn back on my own resources, as Americans are fond of saying—a turn of phrase that could have been invented only in a country with resources to burn.
2 April
I am folding baby socks. Yasha finally down for his afternoon nap, his wardrobe of miniaturized garments, still warm from the automatic drying machine, piled on the kitchen table before me. I think that breathing in the innocence of these clothes, their lack of mileage and cynicism, such repositories of love, is one of the few truly peaceful acts I have known. My American son asleep in the next room. For him, love is not yet knowing what is to come; for me, it is trying to forget what has passed. These two sides of our love, how we reach across time to be here together…
Never mind. I am thinking too much. Breathe; let go; fold; breathe…
In my driveway, where no visitor is expected, a car door slams.
I am on my front porch before the Widow can take two steps; I don’t want her inside my house, near my child. Her turquoise chapeau, black woolen shawl, and wide-legged pants so elegant and preposterous as to seem part of some costume drama unfolding for no clear reason in my average desert yard. Her makeup too heavy for this afternoon matinee. Waving off her personal physician and architect stud muffin, who have driven her in her dead husband’s Cherokee red Mercedes (he collected them, he collected them all), she walks slowly, fiercely upright and unaccompanied, trailing an aura of cold triumph, from the car to my porch. In her hands a small box wrapped in exquisite handmade paper.
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